Harvard Students Make Cake: Sprayed From A Can And Nuked In The Microwave

It’s the brainchild of a Harvard student trying to come up with a final project for his cooking class. He had to pass the class, after all — so why not figure out how to make cake using an aerosol can and a microwave? That’s exactly what John McCallum did.

“We had a final required with the course,” McCallum told ABC News. “We wanted an excuse to eat a lot of cake. Spray Cake is the excuse I came up with.”

It started out as a simple question: cake requires baking soda or baking powder to rise, so what if you could skip the baking soda and make cake using a pressurized aerosol can? McCallum decided to give it a try, with the help of classmate Brooke Nowakowski.

It’s the technology of a whipped cream can, except instead of whipped cream you use cake batter. The crazy part is, it works — you spray cake batter into a muffin tin, stick the pan in the microwave for 30 seconds, and you have cupcakes.

“You can simply pull it off the shelf, make one cupcake, then put it back in the fridge and it won’t go bad,” Nowakowski told The Globe.

McCallum says Joanne Chang, chef of Flour bakeries, is the one who inspired his project. She appeared as a guest speaker to give a lecture on the chemistry of cakes, and that’s what sparked McCallum’s invention. When McCallum and Nowakowski tested the invention on their professor, Chang nodded her approval and said “I’d add a little more salt, but that’s just me,” according to The Globe.

The students’ success didn’t end there. After entering the 2014 Harvard Innovation Challenge, McCallum and Nowakowski landed $10,000 for first place. Now, the students are working toward patenting the invention and making it available to consumers.